A New Evangelical Church: Constructing Social Liturgies

Abstract

This thesis imagines an American evangelical church architecture for the twenty-first century. Church architecture has long played an important role in the discipline as a type which ordered Christian worship and acted as a civic monument within the urban fabric. However, as Christianity’s cultural power in the United States waned, the civic and architectural role of church buildings declined. This has emerged in two trends in American evangelical church architecture: the construction of banal, warehouse-like structures for suburban megachurches and the appropriation of non-sacred spaces such theaters, gymnasia, and schools for small urban congregations. In both cases, architecture is reduced to a shell for a privately consumed performance, rather than a formative space of social and sacred community. This thesis proposes a new American evangelical church architecture to recover and reassert the importance of Christian sacred space as both formative for worship and civic engagement. By incorporating both liturgical and public gathering spaces, the church is an architectural citizen of the city that welcomes worshippers and non-worshippers alike. Drawing upon Christian theological principles, the church simultaneously embodies its faith identity and engages openly in the civic realm, committed to the social generosity embodied within the core principles of evangelical faith. The thesis blends the sacred and social, liturgy and community, worship and welcome. The new evangelical church is a space of Christian formation and public gathering, embodying both the commitments of the evangelical faith and a generous engagement with the civic realm.